Some years ago I got involved in the running of a little back street music venue bar. The place was actually owned by Pat, a guy some years younger than me who I liked but really hardly knew.
This wasn't my normal line of work but I'd not long been made redundant and my sense of judgment had gone awry. Maybe it was a mid-life crisis but it sure made a change from the stress and self hatred of middle management and I loved it.
The bar was a scruffy, lively, mad underground music venue with a mostly young crowd. The kids treated me well despite me being 30 years older than a lot of them. The boys bought me shots and asked me about the bands I'd seen and gigs I'd played back in the day; it turned out that nervously buying a record with my paper round pay when I was 14 and being a scared spotty underage kid at some gig in 1980 would one day make me a 'legend'!
And the girls seemed to enjoy flirting playfully with their old bartender. I was a bit nervous with their banter at first but learned to play along when they told me to lighten up and stop being so scared of offending them. They said it was sweet that I never took advantage of their drunken advances like most men would have done, and that my wife was very lucky to have such a good loyal husband.
That was all very nice, but their compliments made me feel guilty and a total fraud: I didn't tell them that my gentlemanly behaviour was really due to my submissiveness, my lack of sexual confidence and my constant awareness of the size of my dick. It wasn't loyalty, respect, self restraint or decency that kept me from taking advantage but my inadequate penis; years of humiliation, embarrassment, scorn had made me shy, nervous and submissive around women.
My business partner Pat was the complete opposite of me in this regard.
Pat was a chancer and a charmer. He'd come up through the underground house music scene, had run dance nights and been involved in the criminal world of drugs. In fact he'd not long served a lengthy spell in prison. He had obviously kept his mouth shut and done someone a favour because he had a lump of capital to buy the pub.
Pat had needed someone respectable to deal with police and local authority licensing, public relations and the business community. Which is where I came in.
Pat was definitely my opposite when it came to sex. Where I was submissive, nervous, timid and small, Pat was dominant, confident, voracious and big. He was known to be a very good lover. Women wanted him; every night there was a string of women hanging around hoping to be invited up to his bed.
The impressive size of Pat's cock was well known and the object of envy and lust. He had a party trick which he sometimes showed off after the pub was shut for a lock in. It involved filling a pint glass with water and flopping his great flaccid cock into it. The water made his already impressive member appear to fill the whole glass. Whenever I saw this I flushed with shame, envy and jealousy. My little thing wasn't even long enough to hang down when soft, nestled in my pubic hair like a tiny acorn.
Pat lived in the flat above the pub along with a changing cast of misfits, drifters, criminals and pub regulars. The place was bigger than the bar with a maze of rooms, halls and corridors. Most of the space was filled with broken sound equipment, old sofas and chairs that had seen better days and dirty mattresses. One of the rooms had been turned into a plywood skateboard half pipe but was now more often used as a bed.
The facilities were available for touring bands to stay after gigs. So most nights, when we'd finally called time, stopped serving, rung the tills, shut the curtains, locked the doors and turned off the lights, half the punters were still inside. Pat would order them to get out or take their drinks up and carry on upstairs, leaving me to cash up and tidy up.
Once I'd finished I'd go upstairs too. Just for one little drink. One little drink which often went on until the morning. It was wrong I know but it was fun.
Often a couple of the girls who worked behind the bar would come down for more drinks and send me upstairs while they finished wiping the glasses for me.
When I got upstairs one of the girls would make space for me on a sofa. This usually meant them sitting on my lap with an arm around my shoulders, tits pressed against me, laughing and blowing smoke in my face. They would share lines of coke and joints with me and we would talk and share secrets.
Pat would usually be in his bedroom with whoever his regular girlfriend was at the time, a couple of her friends and often an associate of his. Every now and then I'd be called upon to go down to the bar and bring them more drinks. I also had to deal with any rowdiness from the rest of the party, kick people out who were misbehaving, attend to latecomers who were banging on the door either by sending them away or letting them in. It fell to me to keep the noise down, break up fights out on the pavement, calm jilted lovers and convince police investigating complaints that we were complying with the conditions of our license. Nothing I couldn't handle.
Hanging out in Pat's bedroom was the cool place to be upstairs after hours and I was always welcome when not otherwise engaged. Pat's girl would be racking up lines of charley, which I never had to pay for; in fact they always made a point of making sure nobody ever took the last line without checking with me. I guess it's how I got paid, after hours. I was happy. It made me popular too. Girls liked to help me fetch drinks and manage the lock-in so they could be part of the inner circle.
At some point though we'd all have to clear out from the bedroom and we'd soon be sitting in the living rooms listening to the sound of shagging above the drum n bass. It seemed to be contagious and couples would slope off for a fuck into rooms decorated with mattresses, broken pub furniture, empty beer kegs, smashed up sound gear, and wet black bin bags full of empty bottles. Pairs would scuttle down to the empty bar to make love in the light of the beer taps and flashing fruit machines.
The pool table was particularly popular for frenzied coupling as was evidenced by the state of it's stained sticky green baize. This despite, or because, the CCTV cameras were positioned perfectly to capture the action in vivid glorious detail.
In such a culture of sexual expectation my prudishness often caused frustration and disappointment. Some girls took offence at my refusal to jump at the chance with gusto and gratitude. The lads would laugh and tell the girls that I was going to go home to give my wife a proper seeing to. That always seemed to make it okay so I played along, although it was far from the truth.
In reality, I crept into my house quietly so as not to wake my wife Jessica and our daughters Amy and Rosie, tiptoed upstairs, undressed and slipped under the duvet beside my warm snoring wife and furtively jerked my tiny hard on to the fantasy of everybody at the bar laughing at my little baby dick.
Eventually, one morning, in the small hours, pressed between the warm bodies of Chelsea and Kim, two of the bar girls with whom I'd been snorting coke and sharing intimate secrets my perverse desire for scorn and degradation, heightened by the combination of drink, weed and cocaine which acted both as a truth drug and an aphrodisiac, I confessed my shameful secret.
It felt right at the time. We'd just done a line and in the silence that followed I spoke life into my fantasy.
"There's something I have to tell you. Please listen. Everyone thinks I'm this wonderful loyal husband and some kind a gentleman and that's why I don't ever fuck any of you even when you want me to. But you're so wrong. I'm not gentlemanly or loyal, I'm a total letch. No, I'm being honest. I'm worse than a pervert. It's not because I'm good or anything, it's because I've got a really small dick. Like really small. Too small."
There was a silence while they wiped the coke from their noses and let my confession sink in:
Kim sniggered and rolled her eyes at me:
"Well, I wasn't expecting to hear that tonight!"
Chelsea frowned
"When you say small what are we talking? How small?"
I told them that it's a little under 3 inches long when erect.
They looked at one another and laughed, covering their mouths with their fingers.
Kim patted my knee and leaned across me to whisper to Chelsea:
"Hang on, how long is just under 3 inches? I'm rubbish at maths."
